This is what it looks like when around 10 million people call for trash pick-up in a city, just in the span of a year. In the year 2023, New Yorkers called the local government reporting missed trash pick-ups at least 45 thousand times.

That is 5 calls to report a missed trash collection for every hour.

Curiously, not all boroughs experience the trash problem equally.

Staten Island reports the most missed trash collections for every 100 thousand residents, while Manhattanites and Bronxites report the least complaints.

Brooklyn and Queens are always close to each other when it comes to these figures, finding themselves in the middle.

I tried to reach out to New York's Department of Sanitation to ask them about this, but they never returned my emails.

The data I acquired luckily also included data about how long before a trash complaint has been resolved.

Not all boroughs experience the same pick-up times after their calls. Interestingly, Manhattan has always had the quickest pick-ups until recently.

In 2023, Manhattanites experienced the slowest pickups for their trash after they call the city about missed collections.

Other boroughs experience wait times between 2 and 4 days. Manhattanites wait for over 10 days before their missed trash collections are resolved, according to the data.

The map below shows the range of these wait times.

With the map below, we see that Manhattanites generally have the longest wait times compared to the rest of the city, which are all lit up in green.

This is especially interesting because Manhattanites report the least missed trash collections in the city, but when they do, they tend to wait the most, according to the data.